How Big Is Social Media And Does It Really Count As 'Big Data'?
Title: How Big Is Social Media And Does It Really Count As 'Big Data'?
Blog #2
Name : Devina
Student ID : D0731576
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/02/11/how-big-is-social-media-and-does-it-really-count-as-big-data/#54a2e806f2c1
Written by: Kalev Leetaru
When we think about Big Data, the first thing that comes out from our mind is that hundreds of, millions of, or even trillions of numbers. But what is the correlation between social media and big data in general?
Actually, if you look closely at social media activities, you would be surprised by its dataset volume. Let's take Facebook as an example, Facebook announced its first large research dataset last year, that consisting of a petabyte of data which Facebook users globally have clicked their public URL. All the dataset is expected to contain just 30 billion rows in which estimated to be relatively small.
In many researcher's points of view, 30 billion rows sound like a huge amount of data that they couldn't possibly analyze in their lifetime. By modern standards, however, 30 billion records are considered as a tiny dataset.
If we compare with news media, social media isn't that large. Twitter has become the face of a big data revolution when it comes to understanding global society. The company is certainly a large dataset, however, in terms of actual textual tweet contents that most analyses focus on, trillion tweets don't actually work out to that much text due to their tiny size. This means that Twitter is more similar to behavioral messaging data than a traditional content-based platform.
News media offers a larger volume of analyzable content with far better-understood source, stability, and historical context compare to Twitter that might only be faster. This also indicates that traditional data sources are actually just as large as the social archives we work with. The definition of "Big Data" to social media is because of the aggressive marketing on its brand while journalism failed to do so in the digital era.
Blog #2
Name : Devina
Student ID : D0731576
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/02/11/how-big-is-social-media-and-does-it-really-count-as-big-data/#54a2e806f2c1
Written by: Kalev Leetaru
When we think about Big Data, the first thing that comes out from our mind is that hundreds of, millions of, or even trillions of numbers. But what is the correlation between social media and big data in general?
Actually, if you look closely at social media activities, you would be surprised by its dataset volume. Let's take Facebook as an example, Facebook announced its first large research dataset last year, that consisting of a petabyte of data which Facebook users globally have clicked their public URL. All the dataset is expected to contain just 30 billion rows in which estimated to be relatively small.
In many researcher's points of view, 30 billion rows sound like a huge amount of data that they couldn't possibly analyze in their lifetime. By modern standards, however, 30 billion records are considered as a tiny dataset.
If we compare with news media, social media isn't that large. Twitter has become the face of a big data revolution when it comes to understanding global society. The company is certainly a large dataset, however, in terms of actual textual tweet contents that most analyses focus on, trillion tweets don't actually work out to that much text due to their tiny size. This means that Twitter is more similar to behavioral messaging data than a traditional content-based platform.
News media offers a larger volume of analyzable content with far better-understood source, stability, and historical context compare to Twitter that might only be faster. This also indicates that traditional data sources are actually just as large as the social archives we work with. The definition of "Big Data" to social media is because of the aggressive marketing on its brand while journalism failed to do so in the digital era.
Aileen 蔣慧玲
ReplyDeleteD0726917
Comment#5
The article which Devina has shared is interesting. We all know that big data means extremely large datasets that can be analyzed to get trends and patterns, especially about data that is related to human behaviors and interactions. We might think social media like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram have the largest datasets compared to others.
It is said that Facebook contains 30 billion rows of datasets. When we hear the amount of the datasets volume, we think it is a very large dataset. However, according to modern standards, 30 billion rows of datasets is considered a tiny dataset.
According to the article, social media is considered small datasets compare to news media. Even Twitter, which I thought has a very large dataset because it consists of a lot of tweets from all over the world, is considered tiny size. From the article, I learned that news media contains a larger volume.
In conclusion, big data contains a very large volume that I can’t even imagine how big it is. Even if social media looks like it has a large volume of datasets, it is still incomparable with the volume of datasets that news media have. I also learned a new thing, traditional data sources can also be as large as data that we can get from the internet and it can even be larger. So, I think it is very important to use big data technology to help analyze data for traditional data sources too. In that way, everything can be done effectively and efficiently.
吳彩麗
ReplyDeleteJacqueline Vivi
D0732325
Comment #2
Like most of people my age, I’m an avid user of social media. This article Devina shared actually deepens my knowledge about social media data. All of this time, I thought that social media has the largest data set as every individual post at least once a day in at least one social media platform.
Take Twitter for example. It is one of my most frequently use social media platform. In its 13 years, trillions of tweets, retweets, replies are being made each second. However, I learned that although at first glance a trillion tweets sounds like an incredibly large number, especially given that each of those trillion tweets consists of a json record with a number of fields. Tweets are extremely small. This is because they max out at just 140 characters of text. This means that while there are a lot of tweets, each of those tweets says very little. More shockingly, few tweets comes anywhere near Twitter's historical 140-character limit. The average English tweet is around 34 characters while the average Japanese tweet is 15 characters reflecting the varying information conveyed by a single character in each language.
What Devina concluded is right that if we compare with news media, social media isn't that large. News media offers a larger volume of analyzable content with far better-understood source, stability, and historical context. However, we know that in social media people put in their personal information and data. Therefore, all though social media is considered small, I hope that we can improve the data security and making sure that all the data are stored for good use.